i have precious little time

whenever i listen to music it makes me want to make more music. whenever i read more it makes me want to start writing again. i've been reading joan didion's 'the year of magical thinking' which is about the aftermath of her husband's death and her daughter's serious illness (which escalated dramatically after her husband's death). it's an incredibly interesting and insightful book and i really love it. naturally it fills me with morbid thoughts- similar to the 'love is a mixtape' book that billy got me for christmas one year.
one of my favorite tidbits i've picked up from 'the year of magical thinking' is what joan didion refers to as 'the vortex effect.' i finally have a term for what happens to me when i go home. the older i get the more i see this even though i am still much younger than joan didion is (thus the effect is much more dramatic in her life). basically when i drive around in kansas city i usually can't drive around without driving past something familiar that sucks me back into this weird kind of chain of vivid memories and i'll remember the strangest things that i haven't thought about in years. they're very sudden and the effects are kind of curious- i usually can't explain it after it happens, but it happens a lot.
that's usually the state i'm in when i've gone through a deep myspace wormhole and i start to get completely overwhelmed with nostalgia for things and people that i haven't thought about in years. my last trip to kc was a lot like this in many ways. i don't know that i've written about it too much. i haven't really written about anything other than the parts that got finished (big surprise). i managed to get to lawrence on this last trip, which was incredibly unexpected. on my first day in town after recording billy had to go up to lawrence for school and i ended up tagging along with him and i had about an hour or two (not real sure now- an hour sounds too short and two sounds too long) to walk around and do whatever i wanted. he parked right by where the pirate house used to be (which is where the short bus kids used to play probably 90% of the time) at 14th and kentucky and i walked downtown from there. it was interesting- kind of a dual time- i went to a lot of places i used to go all the time and then some places that i never used to go. lawrence is kind of nice in this regard- i spent a fair amount of time there but i did about the same four or five things every time i went there, so there's still new groung to cover when i go back these days. i went to mass street music for example, which i'd always passed on the way and never gone inside of. i went to the lovegarden and bought the vinyl version of the first walkmen album- which is basically two short records in one package- the tracks are all in a different running order and there are some extra tracks. i went to java break too which has changed a ton over the years- that was a highlight i'd say- a place i used to go that had changed enough but still stayed the same in other ways that it was really nice to be there. i didn't get to the bourgeois pig, which is a place i normally go when i'm in lawrence because i like the beers they have on tap and because i never went there when i was living in kansas city so it's a new place to me. i had a really good time there.
i'm amazed at how much i was able to squeeze in in kansas city even though i wasn't even quite there for two full days. all of the recording and then there was a decent amount of loafing time as well. it served well as a prelude to the christmas visit. i feel like there's less pressure to get more fitted in when i'm in town. we're currently trying to get an acoustic show going. we were going to play at the record bar on the 29th, we changed our flights to leave on the 30th (it only cost $40 total) and then the booking person there told us he made a snafu and couldn't offer us the 29th after all, but that the only slot he had left was on the ad astra per aspera show on the 27th. naturally that would work well. i haven't heard from mike yet. i kind of feel like it will work out since we've played with them before and that they're our friends and all but i can't help feel a bit anxious until it's firmed up and i know it's going to happen. we really fucked up last year not getting to fit the acoustic show in- i was really bummed about that. i guess it's probably better not to do it every year in reality. i'm going to try to get more string players for this one to play for about half of it. if that doesn't work it's not the end of the world.
anyway, the battery is getting low and i'll just ramble on anyway and i can't seem to get an outlet at this coffee shop to save my life. i think it's time to get a new computer. i think i'm just going to have to pay for it myself and have to do the apple payments on it- they can be as low as $24 a month. why not? we can't go on like this and the last two laptops have belonged to stefanie, it would be nice to have gotten one that belongs to me. they definitely have more memory space than this dinosaur- 120 gb is the lowest storage that the bottom of the line one has.